My practice is the result of my interest in the eroticism and geometry manifested through painting and installation. My recent work has largely referenced the human body and gender conditions; abstract and geometrical representations of bodies are made with diverse materials such as paint, sand, plaster, wood, fake fruits and shampoo, and more traditional oil paints.
A more inclusive vision of sexuality can change and improve the way we live. This has been made apparent through the contributions of Feminists and queer theoreticians. This is also a space where I locate dialogues that are informative for my work. I play with gender pictorially, mixing spiritual values, historical appreciations, esthetics and styles.
I am interested in the anthropological importance of decoration as a process and in its application in objects, and I play with this by challenging fixed ideas and unconscious meaning. How does a mind sense the materialities and shapes of things? Why do we make decisions in one way and not in another? Is there a place where these dualisms are simultaneously possible? I convert everyday materials into something new, as in Manzanas [Apples] where geometric forms adorn fake plastic fruits.
My work as a painter engages a diversity of formats and media, from easel painting and installation, to the organization of cultural projects and results of the relationships between artists. I have participated actively with artist collectives like as Kiosko De Artistas, and in projects of col-leagues, clinical workshops and research meetings. I co-founded PintorAs [Female Painters], a project that includes 20 women artists from Argentina.
As a curator, I organized the exhibitions Rework and Figuras [Figures], as a way to collectively investigate answers to questions of deep personal interest.

“Las chicas de Flores se pasean tomadas de los brazos, para transmitirse sus estremecimientos, y si alguien las mira en las pupilas, aprietan las piernas, de miedo de que el sexo se les caiga en la vereda.”1

Adriana Minoliti (b. Buenos Aires 1980) works from her Buenos Aires studio, located in the neighborhood of Flores, where I found the artist eager to discuss her work. A candid speaker and avid reader and writer, Minoliti constantly participates in debates and criticism about her work and is open to discussing both its formal qualities as well as its content.

I visited Minoliti’s studio a few days before accompanying her to a political protest supporting gay marriage equality, where, in front of the Casa Rosada, we spent the night participating in a group performance by La Movida del Diablo. She welcomed me with tea and her calico cat, Saori. A feminist interested in geometry and metaphysics, Minoliti’s visual toolbox consists mainly of abstract, two-dimensional shapes, although she does not feel tethered to traditional painting or visual material. She is frequently involved in the independent development of cultural projects and art shows and is deeply interested in relationships as an art form, particularly those between artists.

Her metaphysical study is the “result of her interest in eroticism and geometry.”2 She analyses and references the human body in shapes that allow the viewer’s gaze to find the sensuality in the lines of a circle overlapping a triangle. As a politically active feminist, she believes sexuality can “change and make better the way we live,”3 a stance reflected in her geometric nude proposals for Playboy magazine.

Despite her assertive politics and bold visual approach, she seemed timid and shy. She moved around the studio quietly, showing me her works which are extremely organized within the tiny, unheated studio. Portela, the house she rents along with eight to ten other artists, is an old house with three floors, where young, up and coming artists share a small kitchen, a bathroom, and conversation. After visiting her studio, she offered me a tour of the place, explaining that she was one of the artists in charge of organizing the rental arrangements, and I was able to sneak into several of the other rooms.

During her residency in Mexico earlier this year, she researched domestic decoration and household adornments. Several of her resulting studies were at her studio, with artificial apples, table mirrors, and embroidered centerpieces: playful, domestic objects masking works loaded with sexual references. Her curiosity about objects we take for granted took her on a search to “defy fixed ideas and unconscious signifieds,”4 displacing the expected allegories that appear in quotidian objects with an abstracted sensuality.

Minoliti finds geometry in everything and constantly makes references to art historical styles. Among her influences she counts Argentine artist Roberto Aizenberg and British artist Sarah Lucas. As role models she lists Argentine artists Graciela Hasper and Diana Aisenberg. Minoliti works both in intimately scaled drawings and large canvases. She also works with wood culled from lamps, posts, and discarded blocks from which she assembles plants in a vase or balconies; one work builds on found mannequin legs, as if from a Giorgio de Chirico painting.

The influence of Madi is present as well, in her irregularly shaped objects. Visiting Minoliti in her studio was refreshing, providing an opportunity for direct and undistracted conversation about her work and offering insight into the intrinsic meanings behind a highly referential work. However shy and timid she might be, her works speak otherwise. This contradiction of author and artwork is something that I could not have anticipated before the studio visit. Unlike Oliverio Girondo’s girls from Flores, Adriana Minoliti deals with sexuality and eroticism without reservation. No one can mistake her for an introverted, submissive woman: Minoliti takes the lead role as the female metaphysical painter of the younger generation of Argentine artists.

1_Olvierio Girondo, “Exvoto (A las chicas de Flores),” in Veinte poemas para ser leídos en el tranvía (Madrid :
Visor, 1989).
2_Adriana Minoliti, “Artist Statement,” (accessed November 25, 2011)
3_Ibid.
4_Ibid.